1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to circuitry for resonators, frequency dividers and/or resonant amplifiers and more particularly to a passive complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) resonator used as a frequency divider and a low noise parametric resonant amplifier.
2. Description of the Related Art
The frequency divider is an essential block in phase-locked loops (PLLs) and frequency synthesizers. The design of the frequency divider block in any system is critical, since it consumes a large portion of the overall system power and it is one of the key contributors to the phase noise. It is known that design of the frequency divider becomes even more challenging at high frequencies due to the limited speed of digital gates in a conventional digital frequency divider. At these frequencies an injection-locked frequency divider has been a good candidate due to its high speed and low power consumption. Although there have been several works to further minimize the power consumption of the injection-locked frequency divider, the use of transistors for sustaining oscillation limits these efforts. Moreover, the channel noise caused by transistors degrades the output phase noise at a large offset frequency or near the edge of the locking range.
There have recently been a few works on parametric frequency dividers on printed circuit boards (PCB). However, the operation frequency is limited to a maximum 2 gigahertz (GHz) and these frequency dividers cannot be implemented in a CMOS process.
In an RF receiver front end, a low noise amplifier (LNA) is a potentially important block because it mainly determines the noise figure (NF) of the entire system. There have been many previous efforts to minimize the NF of LNAs in a CMOS process. A source-degenerated CMOS LNA is one of the most prevalent structures, which achieves input matching without a real resistor and exploits an input resonant network for signal amplification. A gM-boosted LNA and positive feedback LNA are also attractive modifications of a conventional common-gate CMOS LNA. In another approach, a sub-0.2-dB NF CMOS LNA was implemented with a non-50Ω signal-source impedance. However, no linear amplifier can achieve NF below 0 dB, because input noise is amplified by the same gain as the signal, and additional noise sources associated with the loss exist in the input matching network and the intrinsic active device noise.
The phenomenon of “noise squeezing” was originally studied in optics for precise measurements constrained by the uncertainty principle, which sets a fundamental limit to the simultaneous observation of two conjugate parameters, such as the photon number and its phase. Because the uncertainty principle preserves the multiplication of the variances of two conjugate parameters, a degenerate parametric amplifier can suppress one of the quadrature noise components at the expense of amplifying the other quadrature component through phase-sensitive amplification.
Noise squeezing was also demonstrated in the mechanical and electrical systems as classical analogues of optical systems to beat the thermal noise limitation. Specifically, Josephson's parametric amplifier using a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) was designed to implement noise squeezing in an electrical system. However, this amplifier requires a very low operation temperature (around 0 K) and is not integrable on a chip.
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Pollard, “Microwave Parametric Frequency Dividers With Conversion Gain,” IEEE Trans. MTT, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 2059-2064, October 2007; (13) A. Yariv, W. H. Louisell, “Theory of the Optical Parametric Oscillator,” IEEE J. of Quantum Electronics, vol. QE-2, no. 9, pp. 418-424, September 1966; (14) S. E. Harris, “Tunable Optical Parametric Oscillators,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 57, no. 12, December 1969; (15) P. K. Tien and H. Suhl, “A Traveling-wave Ferromagnetic Amplifier,” Proc. IRE, vol. 46, pp. 700-706, April 1958; (16) P. K. Tien, “Parametric Amplification and Frequency Mixing in Propagating circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 29, no. 9, pp. 1347-1357, September 1958; (17) CMRF8SF Model Reference Guide, IBM Microelectronics Division, April 2007; (18) L. E. Myers, R. C. Eckardt, M. M. Fejer, and R. L. Byer, “Quasi-Phase-Matched Optical Parametric Oscillators in Bulk Periodically Poled LiNbO3,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 2102-2116, November 1995; (19) D. M. 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Description of the Related Art Section Disclaimer: To the extent that specific publications are discussed above in this Description of the Related Art Section, these discussions should not be taken as an admission that the discussed publications (for example, published patents) are prior art for patent law purposes. For example, some or all of the discussed publications may not be sufficiently early in time, may not reflect subject matter developed early enough in time and/or may not be sufficiently enabling so as to amount to prior art for patent law purposes. To the extent that specific publications are discussed above in this Description of the Related Art Section, they are all hereby incorporated by reference into this document in their respective entirety(ies).